A specialist anesthetist in Adelaide, South Australia, Richard Harris, SC, OAM, was in the operating theater working a thyroid case when he got the call in early July 2018.
It was from Rick Stanton, the British lead diver of a team trying to rescue 12 boys and their soccer coach from inside the Tham Luang Nang Non cave in Chiang Rai Province in northern Thailand, where they had been stranded underground nine days earlier by rising floodwaters.
Stanton, a retired firefighter from the United Kingdom, had been on site for the past four days with three other British divers but had only reached the children and their coach a few days later when earlier strong underground currents subsided enough to begin a rescue attempt.
“Rick asked if I could come over and consider sedating the children to get them out of the cave,” Dr. Harris told attendees at the World...
